Last year I was discussing the idea that as web designers and developers are the poeple who suffer most from IE6’s continued usage, we are responsible for doing what we can to educate users into upgrading.
37 Signals also announced that they would no longer actively support IE6, a step in the right direction but it doesn’t actively encourage users to change their browser unless a change is made which actually stops the software from working in the offending browser.
Today I was alerted to Web developer, Thom Shannon’s latest website update. He has taken a new approach and one which I applaud.
If a user visits his blog with IE6, the page displays in black and white. The page also shows a message pointing out that the browser is outdated and suggesting some alternatives.
That’s the genius part, and like all great ideas, it seems so obvious. If you want IE6 users to upgrade, simply ask them to and provide them with links to the alternatives. This surely will convert more users than a gradual dropping of support for the old browser.
Thom Shannon's Blog showing IE6 view compared with the normal view
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Interesting article, it made me look at our traffic details.
At deskaway 33% of IE users have IE6.0 which is quite a large number!
http://www.deskaway.com
Thanks Priya, I expect that a lot of people using IE6 are doing so on work computers where they do not have control over which software is installed. I would have hoped that Windows Update would have helped to increase the speed with which corporate IT departments would upgrade the standard browser. I know from experience (roll out of IE 5.5 to 7500 desktops) that something as simple as a browser upgrade is no small task in big organisations.
It’s a difficult situation, IE6 is the last remnant of the days when web designers would spend as much as 50% of project time on cross-browser compatibility.
One of my clients put a lot of pressure on me to support IE6, which was difficult for my “anti-IE6 ideals”. At the last check, they found that IE6 accounted for 24% of the traffic.
I found that the old IE6-targeted CSS (with conditional comments) is the way to go.
Like you say Dave, there are still a lot of corporate IE6 users, who can’t upgrade their browser due to internal IT policies, etc.
I blame Vista… it feels that corporations doesn’t want to upgrade! (i.e. incompatibilities, training costs, etc.) Whereas XP “does the job”.
THis seen this in .net
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/discover-culture/calling-time-on-ie6